Michael[tm] Smith, Mon, 5 Nov 2012 16:46:36 +0900:
> Anyway, one problem currently is that a lot of people don't seem to know
> that the validator.nu HTML parser exists.
Making Polyglot Markup a Note is not the right way to promote the
validator.nu parser.
> Some seem to assume it's not even
> possible for such a parser to be used with an XML toolchain, and so some
> then end up advocating for polyglot and whatever else as the best-practice
> way to do things,
First: If you can dig up someone who *seriously* promote polyglot
markup, then I am all ears. I hear much more about how smart e.g. the
validator.nu parser is.
Second: You seem to think that polyglot is only about the syntactic
cruft - typically the "/>" in void elemnets. But it is also about the
encoding. HTML5 says that only UTF-8 is fully reliable in all aspects.
Polyglot markup is a super subset of the sensible common ground of HTML
and XML. In that way, polyglot markup follows the trend: It actually
*removes* cruft - it improves by removing options.
> when in fact the ideal best practice really ought to be
> that you're free to mark up your HTML document in whatever syntax you prefer
> -- the text/html one or the XML one --
Why should you even have to "prefer"??? Polyglot Markup is about saying
good bye to the need to prefer anything.
> and all your tools should be smart
> enough to consume it and handle it the way the validator.nu parser does.
And if you feed the document to a XML parser, then what?
> Another problem is that we don't yet have similar parser libraries for most
> other programming languages. That's a solvable problem, but I guess the
> solution needs to start with the people who develop and use XML toolchains
> in those languages. They need to realize it's possible to put a non-XML
> HTML parser in front of those, and understand the value of doing it.
Again, I don't think making Polyglot Markup is the key to make that
happen. Instead of seeing Polyglot Markup as a competitor, you should
add a option to convert the validated source to polyglot markup - a
little bit (but only a little bit) the same way that the old W3
validator has an option to run the validated source through HTML Tidy.
It would be a powerful demonstration of the power of the validator.nu
parser, no?
--
leif halvard silli